For some, writing is their livelihood. They can be, barring receipt of a Booker Prize, a Governor General's Literary or a media writing award, persons of sorrow and acquainted with grief. For others writing is a passion that cannot be denied and, for still others, occupational therapy. Someone said all writers are failed conversationalists.

Not so. Another opined that scribblers cannot think on their feet as do televangelists or some parliamentarians. They, therefore, must do so sitting down with writing materials or a keyboard at hand.

Anon who, with his colleague Ibid, is one of my favourite authors, said, "The beginning of any written piece is easy; what follows is the difficult part".

Angles 'n' Attitudes is approaching its twentieth year on this page. Several people a year ask, "How long does it take to put 1000 or so words on paper each week?". Well, - that word is the most frequently used prefix to answering a question - there is never a stopwatch to time the 'word-processing'. This scribe does not first lay out a plan for the finished product as Miss Gertrude Husband taught us to do at Runnymede School. The writing goes with the flow - or flight - of thought. Outdoing the tidal bore on the Petitcodiac River at Moncton, one's stream of consciousness can retreat and then reverse itself at varying depths more than twice a day.

In this case, the first application of pencil to foolscap may take an hour, minus the time demanded by incoming telephone calls. Those interruptions are the reason that 700 to 900 and 2000 to 2200 hrs are my preferred daily times for writing unless one has retreated to monastic premises. More commonly, one's writing times are where one finds them. When possible, a weekly columnist tries to keep ten days between conception and the due date.

The first hour of writing should produce a minimum of 400 words in their initial or reconfigured form. That will include time out for checking references in books and on-line. That research is part of the fun and of the pleasure. May Providence bless those who teach each new generation how to mine the resources of school, civic and other libraries.

Once the full complement of words is on paper it must then be computerised, if that be a word. Then comes its assumption into cyperspace, not always on fiery chariot wheels nor attended by angels, and, finally, its canonisation in print Publication does not guarantee inerrancy but, face it, what one reads, infallible or not, takes up residence in the mind and, as Leon Bloy said about sin in The Woman Who Was Poor, traverses space, transfixes suns and reaches to the outer limits of the universe.

Even what the Greeks called hairesis and we have vilified as 'heresy' is not necessarily subversive. The Greek word meant, simply, 'opinion'. Those who hold contrary opinions are not ipso facto dangerous or depraved people.

What I think may differ from someone else's 'take 'on the matter. Truth, like a diamond, has various facets and different 'lights'. The charge of heresy has usually had a political as well as a philosophical or theological dimension.

It is a challenge to remember that what one types into a computer this morning may be read later today by friends and colleagues throughout around the world. That will include the atrocious paragraphing imposed by the necessity of journalistic spacing and the reproduction of typos that might have been caught by a more careful author or copy editor. Oh well, what one reads here is not going to be published by McClelland & Stewart.

As far as the terror of writer's block is concerned, the great story teller, Guy de Maupassant, counselled us to "just get something black onto something white every day". Somebody added "even if that be only a suicide note". One may even include one of those planet- transfixing literary sins. Hilaire Belloc, G.K Chesterton's contemporary, wrote, "When I am dead, I hope it may be said / Though his sins were scarlet, what he wrote was read".

Let me see now, what did Belloc write? Whatever it was, the pleasure of communication with one's contemporaries, and their response, is considerable. Even when somebody writes to say what a knave or fool one is and adds to a signature the ostentation of multiple academic degrees, the contest of varying ideas is satisfying. Civilisation really began when we stopped beating one another about the head - or elsewhere - and began writing letters to the editor.

Parliamentary and Congressional adversaries do not usually relate to one another as do the rest of us, nor are many of them the most profound of thinkers. With their well documented difficulty in managing their marriages and personal lives, how could we trust them to govern the nation without active opposition?

But there are limits. A USA friend sent me a recent e-mail that asked, "If Pro-gress means moving forward, what does Con-gress mean? ". Some would say that constant attack dog debating means the death of democracy from legislative cardiac arrest.

But apart from politics, religion, philosophy, history, literature, nostalgia, nonsense and all the other things one writes about here, this space is a personal "footprint in the sands of time", as Longfellow put it.

With the diaries one has kept to record for posterity the fact that one was here, I, like Belloc, am intrigued by the thought that what you are reading now may be read, probably on microfiche, by someone in the year 2209. The Metropolitan Toronto borough of Dufferin will then have a population of 250,000.

Someone yet unborn may be moved to research what interested, concerned or amused this and other local writers back in the 21st Century.

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Limericks Contest

As announced here in October, we will publish on December 24 limericks about persons, places or other aspects of life in Dufferin County. See the advertisement on page A4.